~ martial arts training for life

Because I must.

“Obligation” has been the word on my mind this week. We seem to increasingly be living in a world that promises us personal choice and relegates obligation to the dustbin of history. A television ad for an online university brought this to my attention recently. The actor/student in the ad states, “I want classes I control, not lectures I have to sitthrough.” How exactly he already knows what he needs to learn, I’m not sure. And, even if he thinks he knows, is he not discounting the fact that someone older and wiser just might have something else of value to teach him.

Requiring that students study a broad range of material in certain ways accomplishes two important things. First, it establishes standards that we can expect and rely on. Imagine, for instance, if doctors no longer took the obligatory courses in med school and just cut straight to the “good bits.” Or what if soldiers no longer had to go through basic training? But knowing all the material is important for another reason as well. If we don’t learn what our teachers have to show us, whether we need it or not, that knowledge can get lost indefinitely.

This is particularly true in the world of martial arts. None of us have been forced to train and we all start out studying primarily for selfish reasons; physical fitness, self-defense, etc. As such, there is no legal or ethical reason why we can’t structure our training and our learning any way we want. In the end, we are the only ones who will benefit or be hurt by these choices. I have always advocated finding a variety of ways to train but they should all serve a single purpose. And I don’t suggest people jump around from style to style because, in my experience, you have to spend a lot of time working on anything if you want to become excellent.

But, what if you don’t want to be excellent. What if you just want to have fun and sample a little of this and that. No one is going to stop you but consider this idea. You don’t just have an obligation to yourself to be as good as you can be. You also have an obligation to all those who came before you to remember, practice, and possibly pass along what you have learned. This obligation to others can be a very powerful motivator, particularly when you are lacking in personal reasons to train. Martial arts have always been handed down from person to person, elder to younger, via word of mouth. Very few books come even remotely close to encapsulating the complexity of ideas that reside in each style or system. If you stop, everything that you know stops with you.

You might say, “There are others who are more dedicated that I am and they will be the keepers of the fire.” But, if we all said this, real knowledge would be lost forever. And, in making this statement you discount the fact that you may have seen, learned, and understood things in ways that others have not. You may know more than you know and that knowledge is precious.

So, if you find yourself unmotivated in the next week, consider the history and lineage of your style. Consider all the people who have learned, trained, and taught what you now practice. See yourself amongst their ranks and accept that responsibility. You have an obligation to those who have trained you as well as to those who you will teach some day. This sense of being an important part of history motivates me at times when my personal choice cannot. I hope it helps you as well.

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2 thoughts on “Because I must.”

What if “obligation” and “basic training” become corrupt? That is, through years of blind following they begin to deviate from the truth? The classic communication game is as follows: the first person sends a clear message to the next person and asks them to pass it along verbatim to the next man. As the game goes, by the time the message reaches the fifth or sixth man its meaning is completely different from the original.

Where is the balance between building on the shoulders of giants and introducing noise, if not complete quackery into the chain of learning? How do we know when we’ve gone off course? Is there any feedback to continuously improve the system of learning and build on the truth? It seems that the only way to avoid this is to continue starting at the beginning and build from there. I’ve had a lot of thoughts lately about beginnings and how important it is to keep going back to beginnings in order to move forward. Doctrine and dogma often get a bad wrap, but it seems to me that we all need sound foundations. I see you hinting at this here, but I’m interested in hearing your thoughts, especially in relation to martial arts, and to learning in general. There is a reason people want the “distilled version”, though I don’t think that’s at all what learning is about.

Your excellent feedback is suggesting a whole blog post on this subject in the future. In my mind there are two different ideas here that I want to address. First, martial arts are rife with “corruption” for the very reasons you lay out. Over time ideas are gradually altered. This has tended to reflect changes in society. In the last 100+ years, self-defense has become less of an urgent need as the rule of law has made society safer. More leisure time has led to the rise of sporting activity and activities exclusively for health and well-being. Combined with all of that are plenty of instructors who never received the entire “picture” from their teachers but pass along what they know as if it is the full extent of knowledge on the subject. However, as long as you maintain a clear set of goals for why you train, you should be able to test any hypothesis against that goal. If self-defense is your goal, your techniques should work outside the training hall, in adverse conditions, and against non-compliant training partners (or real-life attackers).

I do not think anyone should blindly follow any doctrine and if you are chastised for questioning it, that is the sign of false advertising. Everything should stand up to scrutiny. But I should add that I believe there is great value in the “old ways” of thinking and to discount that and constantly start over seems a poor way to make progress. This is in part because a well chosen teacher has spent years examining a subject that you are new to. Even if you bring along your own perspectives and baggage, and even if they are well formed, you can never know what you might gain from learning what they have to teach.

And this brings me to my second point in regards to education in general. We may be moving towards a society where everyone essentially goes to a technical college to learn the one skill which they want to learn and, in turn, make money from. But choices would they have made if they had allowed themselves a broader education. I had no knowledge or interest in martial arts prior to starting in college as a club activity. It has remained an important part of my life ever since. I can point to numerous teachers and classes, outside my main disciplines, that had a profound effect on my thinking, my writing, and my world view. If I had only chosen “what I can control” I would have never had any of these experiences.